Is the Islamist era over?

With the overthrow of
Mohamed Morsi’s Muslim Brotherhood government in Egypt, one is almost forced to
question whether the global Islamist movement has been dealt a mortal blow.

Click photo to download. Caption: A protest against now former Islamist president Mohamed Morsi in Egypt on June 28, 2013. Credit: Lilian Wagdy via Wikimedia Commons.

The notion that the era of
Islamism has come to an end is not as outlandish as it seems. While the faith
of Islam crystallized in Arabia 15 centuries ago, the ideology of Islamism—which
aims to place the imperatives of sharia law at the heart of a coercive and
all-powerful state—is a product of the last century.

Like its totalitarian
cousins—fascism, communism and national socialism—Islamism’s point of departure
is a visceral loathing of the political liberties that are integral to liberal
democracies. All these monstrous political systems were convinced that, once
empowered, they would stay empowered.

Hitler, for example, spoke
of a “thousand-year Reich.” At the height of the purges in the Soviet Union,
Stalin told the writer H. G. Wells that, “socialist
society alone can firmly safeguard the interests of the individual.” But the
Nazi Reich perished in the ashes of Berlin in 1945, while the communist
paradise of the Soviet Union went out of business in 1991.

Will 2013 go down as an
equivalent year of defeat for Islamism? In answering that question, it’s hard
to overstate the importance of the current turmoil in Egypt. After all, Egypt
was where the Muslim Brotherhood was formed in 1928. It is the cradle of
Islamism, and it is the country that gave the Islamist movement a pronounced
taste of bitter struggle as far back as the 1950s, when the Egyptian dictator
Gamal Abdel Nasser crushed the Brotherhood.

Yet Egypt is not the only
Middle Eastern country where the Brotherhood’s insistence that “Islam is the
solution” is being sorely tested. In Gaza, where Hamas, the Palestinian branch
of the Muslim Brotherhood, has been in power since 2006, the Egyptian crisis
has exacerbated an already febrile situation. Infighting among its leadership,
as well as worsening relations with its one-time allies, Syria, Hezbollah and
Iran, is leading many ordinary Palestinians to question the competence of
Hamas. In turn, Hamas is discovering that thundering slogans and terrorist
assaults on Israel cannot feed, clothe, educate and employ a population in
Gaza, or anywhere else for that matter.

In Turkey, a country that is
light years away from Gaza in terms of its economic development, the Islamist
government of Prime Minister Reccep Tayyip Erdogan has faced angry demonstrations
at home and severe censure abroad. Here, too, the citizenry is beginning to
realize that the Islamists cannot deliver when in government—corruption,
nepotism and contempt for free speech are all hallmarks of Erdogan’s regime,
and its talk of Islamic values seems increasingly hollow against that context.

It’s a similar story for
Islamist parties and governments elsewhere in the region. In Tunisia, the
secular political parties in coalition with the Islamist Ennahda party have
been alienated by Ennahda leader Rachid Ghannouchi’s support for Morsi in Egypt.
In Sudan, the Islamist government of Omar al-Bashir, an indicted war criminal,
remains embroiled in conflict with South Sudan, a largely Christian and African
state that declared independence exactly two years ago. Meanwhile, Qatar, the
oil-drenched monarchy deemed by Forbes magazine to be the richest country in
the world, is rethinking its disastrous policy of supporting and financing
Muslim Brotherhood affiliates around the Middle East.

Ironically, among some western
policy analysts, there’s a widely held view that the current tribulations of
the Muslim Brotherhood amount to bad news for democracy in the region. The
military’s removal of the Brotherhood in Egypt, they say, will turn Islamists
against the democratic process, just as it did when a similar scenario arose in
Algeria in 1991.

But the idea that the Muslim
Brotherhood was committed to democracy in the first place is arrant nonsense.
In certain countries, the Brotherhood has made a tactical compromise by
participating in elections; in those cases, like Egypt, where the movement has
won, autocratic and unconstitutional measures have quickly followed.

Moreover, what this debate
ignores is the critical point that democracy is about much more than voting. Elections
in countries where the press is muzzled, where opposition parties are
intimidated, and where the military plays an explicitly political role, are a
farce. Platitudes about respecting the cultural differences of the Muslim world
only cement the absence of those liberties that are integral to a healthy
democracy.

A related argument asserts
that election-friendly Islamists will, as a result of the Egyptian experience,
now be pushed into the arms of violent jihadi groups. There’s a certain degree
of truth to that claim; western dithering in Syria has strengthened the Al
Qaeda-linked Al Nusra Front, and boosted the likelihood of a new war between
secular nationalists and Islamists in the event that Bashar al-Assad’s bloody
regime is removed.

But that line gives the
Muslim Brotherhood far more credit than it deserves. Under Morsi’s rule, Egypt
was as ugly and intolerant as it has ever been; any member of the Coptic Christian
minority, which makes up 10 percent of the population, will confirm that.
Having endured discrimination and pogrom-style violence during Morsi’s tenure,
the Copts know only too well that the Brotherhood's message to non-Muslims is
simply this: convert or die.

Ben Cohen

Hence, there are many
reasons to be both relieved and pleased that Islamism is now in marked retreat.
Even so, we shouldn’t conclude that the triumph of liberal democracy will
inevitably follow. In my estimation, it’s more probable that the Middle East
will reflect the experience of Russia after 1991—anti-western, anti-democratic,
and dominated by the military and the intelligence services—than of Germany
after 1945, where a constitutional, stable democracy took root as a direct
result of the Allied occupation. That is why, while the Islamists may be down
at the moment, they are certainly not out.

Ben Cohen is the Shillman Analyst for
JNS.org. His writings on Jewish affairs and Middle Eastern politics have been
published in Commentary, the New York Post, Ha’aretz, Jewish Ideas Daily and
many other publications.

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